Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PIERRE PURSEIGLE
Although in England we are not likely to be called upon to make the same sacrifices that
our continental neighbours are already making, let it be understood that this is not a war
which can be, or ought to be, left entirely to the Government and the Army and the Navy.
It is a testing time for the people as well as for those who fight for us. The worst temper is
one in which it is assumed that everything will come out right and that meantime we can
go on living just as before. There will be soon rude reminders that that is not possible.1
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Unmistakably tainted by the emergence of the USSR and the rise of Fascism,
Halvys reflections on the war experience emphasized the states direct domination of society and set little store by the role of civil society in wartime. In his
view, the world crisis of 191418 had opened up a new and ominous period in
modern history, whose evils he wished to exorcize. His death in 1937 spared him
the horrors of another world war.
While the social and political legacy of total war exercised historians and
philosophers, military commanders had also devoted a great deal of energy
to these questions since the end of the Great War. Born out of his refusal to
accept his defeat in the field in 1918, the reflections of Erich Ludendorff, Germanys former First Quartermaster-General, focused on the type of state that was
required to ensure Germanys future triumph. In Der totale Krieg, published in
1935, Ludendorff essentially argued that a military dictatorship was the only form
of government which could ensure the necessary mobilization of the nations
resources.3 One can hardly imagine two commentators whose political frames
of reference would be more alien to each other than Halvys and Ludendorff s.
Yet they both stressed the critical centrality of the state in the process of wartime
mobilization.
The First World War had indeed revealed the states capacity to mobilize the
belligerents resources to great effect, irrespective of the specificities of their
political systems. Logically enough, its historiography reflects the importance of
the warring state, and scholars of the war have devoted a great deal of energy to
analysing the operations of the state in the conflict. To a large extent, scholarly
efforts have focused primarily on the wars impact on political regimes, and in
particular on their institutional arrangements and structures. This was the case
with many of the early works, including those published under the aegis of the
Carnegie Endowment Series on the economic and social history of the war.4
Analysts were particularly concerned with the unprecedented degree of state intervention in economic life.5 Even in countries as committed to economic liberalism
as was the United Kingdom in 1914, the state had not hesitated to take control
of essential industries such as the railways (1914), steel (1916) and coal production
(1917). After 1945, this perspective informed wider reflections on the emergence
of a new type of corporatist state, characterized by the wartime partnership
struck between state administrations and business, and greater integration of state
and economic elites. Until the late 1970s, the political and economic history of
the First World War largely revolved around the mobilization of the coercive
3
Hew Strachan, Total war in the twentieth century, in Arthur Marwick, ed., Total war and historical change:
Europe, 19141955 (Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2001), p. 261.
4
Josef Redlich, sterreichische Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkrieg (Vienna: Hlder-Pichler-Tempsky/
Carnegie-Stiftung fr internationalen Frieden. Abteilung fr Volkswirtschaft und Geschichte, 1925); Pierre
Renouvin, Les Formes du gouvernement de guerre. Lorganisation gouvernementale franaise pendant la guerre (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France/Publications de la Dotation Carnegie pour la paix internationale. Section
dconomie et dhistoire, 1925).
5
S. J. Hurwitz, State intervention in Great Britain: a study of economic control and social response, 19141919 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1949).
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6
7
Jrgen Kocka, Facing total war: German society, 19141918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1973).
Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: essays in sociology (London: Routledge,
1998), p. 78.
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Monopoly or devolution of legitimate coercion?
In practical terms, mass military mobilization brought about the devolution of
the means of coercion. In arming millions of their citizens, the warring states
effectively undermined their institutional monopoly of the means of violence.
Unwittingly perhaps, the arch-conservative Heinrich von Treitschke himself
acknowledged as much when he averred that the very constitution of a State
rests upon the distribution of weapons among the people.8 The degree of military
mobilization varied greatly among belligerents but affected almost 30 per cent
of the overall male population aged between 15 and 49.9 Britain, Germany and
France mobilized respectively 12.5 per cent, 15.4 per cent and 17 per cent of their
workers.10
In this respect, the First World War constitutes a remarkable historical situation. To take but one dramatic example, the French mutinies of 1917 shed light on
the particular nature of the constitution of the state. For in this context, soldiers
in arms who had effectively been entrusted with the means of legitimate violence
refused unquestioning obedience to the states bidding. In a remarkable study, Len
Smith revealed how mutineers called upon their identity as citizen-soldiers and
on a conception of popular sovereignty inherited from the French Revolution
to challenge the military authorities. One may indeed argue that in doing so the
mutineers literally and paradoxically perhaps embodied the state.11
Recent historical works have also demonstrated the extent to which Weber had
misunderstood the nature of discipline in the armed forces in his Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft. Whereas he presented it as a purely rational and impersonal mechanism to obtain obedience, historians of First World War armies have stressed the
importance of leadership and command defined as a relationship, however unequal
and however informed by class and cultural prejudices it may have been.12 Indeed,
on both the front line and the home front, the mobilization of belligerents relied
on a conditional and decentralized process.
Most paradoxically perhaps, the idiosyncratic operation of conscription in
Britain further undermines the idea that the state held a monopoly of legitimate
coercion. Witness the military tribunals created by the Military Service Act that
established conscription in 1916 and symbolized the coercive powers of the wartime
state. These tribunals, akin to the local recruitment boards set up in the United
States in June 1917, had been put in place to consider appeals lodged by individuals,
families or businesses against conscription. Arbitrating between the demands of the
military and the interests of local communities, they provided a site where agents
8
9
10
11
Heinrich von Treitschke, The organization of the army (London: Gowans & Gray, 1914), p. 5.
Jay M. Winter, The Great War and the British people (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of extremes: the short twentieth century, 19141991 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 44.
Leonard V. Smith, Between mutiny and obedience: the case of the French Fifth Division during World War I (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
12
Gerth and Mills, eds, From Max Weber, pp. 25360; Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the trenches: officerman relations,
morale and discipline in the British army in the era of the First World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Alexander
Watson, Enduring the Great War: combat, morale and collapse in the German and British armies, 19141918 (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Emmanuel Saint-Fuscien, vos ordres? La relation dautorit
dans larme franaise de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Editions de lEcole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales, 2011).
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Jeanette Keith, Rich mans war, poor mans fight: race, class, and power in the rural South during the First World War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam wants you: World
War I and the making of the modern American citizen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
14
Mehmet Beiki, The Ottoman mobilization of manpower in the First World War: between voluntarism and resistance
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012).
15
Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and civilization: a history of Europe in our time (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 56.
16
Hobsbawm, Age of extremes, p. 44.
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Soldiers & Sailors Families Association played a critical role in maintaining the
cohesion of the home front until June 1916, when the War Pensions Committee
took charge of this mission.
Local, national and comparative studies have demonstrated how voluntary
organizations in this way compensated for the shortcomings of the state, proving
indispensable in the mobilization of the material and cultural resources of the
nation, and even benefiting from the war.17 In Austria-Hungary, the state pursued
what Ke-Chin Hsia called a partnership of the weak to respond to its wartime
delegitimization.18
In France, the war challenged the institutional and normative definition of the
centralized, universalist, republican state and vindicated the pragmatic approach
to public service embraced by Lon Duguit.19 For Duguit argued that the modern
state was, in the era of the Great War, better understood not as a set of coercive
institutions, but as a provider of public services:
The modern State increasingly appears as a group of individuals working in a concerted
fashion to meet the material and moral needs of participants, under the leadership and
control of governing authorities; the notion of public service is thus substituted for that of
public might; the State ceases to be an authority that orders to become a group that works.20
Fiscal state
Finally, the fiscal state needs to be reconsidered in the light of the social dynamics
underlying the mobilization of belligerent societies. In 1914, the fiscal structure of
the belligerent states remained little developed and taxation raised only a portion
of the income needed to support the war effort. As a result, that effort depended on
borrowing, and in particular on domestic borrowing, which provided over 70 per
cent of the belligerents wartime revenue. Such reliance revealed the continuing
support enjoyed by the war among the civilian populations, for only victory in
the field would yield the expected profit.
Nonetheless, taxation was essential to the funding of the war effort, even though
Germany and Britain stood on opposite sides of the wartime fiscal spectrum as the
former relied largely on loans and the latter on taxes.21 For many belligerent states
the adoption of income tax marked a defining moment in their fiscal history.
17
Theda Skocpol, Andrew Karch, Ziad Munson and Bayliss Camp, Patriotic partnerships: why great wars
nourished American civic voluntarism, in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds, Shaped by war and trade:
international influences on American political development (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2002), pp. 13480.
18
Ke-Chin Hsia, A partnership of the weak: war victims and the state in the early First Austrian Republic,
in Gnther Bischof, Fritz Plassner and Peter Berger, eds, From empire to republic: post-World War I Austria,
Contemporary Austrian Studies 19 (Innsbruck: UNO Press and Innsbruck University Press, 2010), pp.
192221. See also his chapter in the next volume published under the aegis of the International Society for
First World War Studies, Who provided care for wounded and disabled soldiers? Conceptualizing statecivil
society relationship in First World War Austria, in Gunda Barth-Scalmani, Joachim Brgschwentner and
Matthias Egger, eds, Other fronts, other wars? (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2014).
19
Pierre Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice, et citoyennet. AngleterreFrance, 19001918 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013).
20
Lon Duguit, Trait de droit constitutionnel, 2 vols (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1927), vol. 1, p. ix.
21
Hans-Peter Ullmann, Finance, in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge history of the First World War, vol. 2, The state
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 417, 421.
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Theo Balderston, Industrial mobilization and war economies, in John Horne, ed., A companion to the First
World War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), p. 225.
23
Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice, et citoyennet.
24
Capozzola, Uncle Sam wants you.
25
Halvy, The era of tyrannies, p. 176.
26
Strachan, Total war in the twentieth century, p. 271.
27
Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les franais sont entrs dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale
des Sciences Politiques, 1977); Jeffrey Verhey, The spirit of 1914: militarism, myth, and mobilization in Germany
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Adrian Gregory, The last Great War: British society and the First
World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
28
John Horne, Public opinion and politics, in Horne, ed., A companion to the First World War, p. 280.
255
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masses rallied to defend the nation,29 96 per cent of soldiers reporting for duty.
Similarly, the French and German armies encountered very little difficulty indeed
in raising their armies.30
Intellectuals, artists and politicians couched this dramatic clash of nations in
strikingly similar terms across the lines of battle. In the words of Oxford scholar
Alfred Zimmern, this was a conflict between two different and irreconcilable
conceptions of government, society and progress.31 Although national political
elites stood at the forefront of this cultural mobilization across the belligerent
world, civil societys commitment to national defence is best described as the
result of self-mobilization.32
This defensive acquiescence in both military engagement and social mobilization had been made possible by the force and resilience of national cultural
constructions.33 The enemy was seen as posing a threat to ones own culture,
identity and way of life; industrialized warfare was thus construed as a lifeand-death struggle and was represented in absolute terms. Notwithstanding the
rhetoric of professional patriotic orators, the defence of the nation was commonly
articulated in communitarian terms and framed in the language of local, class or
religious solidarities.34 The war was construed as a personal battle for the safety
of ones family and home.
The economics of war and the legitimacy of the state
The war cultures were grounded in the moral superiority that each camp claimed
to embody. Yet the ethics of mobilization also ran deeper, helping to define and
regulate behaviours and social relations within the belligerent societies. The
wartime mobilization prompted the emergence of new divisions, new categories
within the belligerent citizenry whose respective positions were evoked in terms
of duty and defined by the wartime social relations of sacrifice.35 The front-line
29
Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian nation: military conscription, total war, and mass politics, 19051925 (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
30
Hew Strachan, The First World War (London: Free Press, 2006).
31
A. Zimmern, German culture and the British commonwealth, in R. W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson,
A. E. Zimmern and A. Greenwood, The war and democracy (London: Macmillan, 1915; first publ. 1914), p. 348.
See also Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie. Les intellectuels et la Premire Guerre
Mondiale (19101919) (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1996); Martha Hanna, The mobilization of intellect: French scholars and
writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
32
John Horne, ed., State, society, and mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
33
Stphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Violence et consentement: La culture de guerre du premier
conflit mondial, in Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-Franois Sirinelli, eds, Pour une histoire culturelle, LUnivers
Historique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997), p. 112.
34
Pierre Purseigle, Beyond and below the nations: towards a comparative history of local communities at
war, in Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle, eds, Uncovered fields: perspectives in First World War studies (Boston
and Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 95123; Stefan Goebel, Forging the industrial home front in Germany: ironnail memorials in the Ruhr, in Macleod and Purseigle, eds, Uncovered fields, pp. 15978; Roger Chickering,
The Great War and urban life in Germany: Freiburg, 19141918, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of
Modern Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3645; Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice,
et citoyennet.
35
Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Capital cities at war: Paris, London, Berlin, 19141919 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 10.
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Melissa K. Stockdale, My death for the motherland is happiness: women, patriotism, and soldiering in
Russias Great War, 19141917, American Historical Review 109: 1, 2004, pp. 78116.
37
Pierre Purseigle, A wave onto our shores: exile and resettlement of Western Front refugees, 19141918,
Contemporary European History 16: 4, 2007, pp. 42744.
38
Balderston, Industrial mobilization and war economies, p. 227.
39
Belinda Davis, Home fires burning: food, politics, and everyday life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill and London:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Maureen Healy, Vienna and the fall of the Habsburg empire: total war
and everyday life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
40
Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting different wars: experience, memory, and the First World War in Britain, Studies in the
Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
41
Norbert Elias, La Socit des individus (Paris: Fayard, 1991).
42
Balderston, Industrial mobilization and war economies, pp. 2234.
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the Central Powers on the other, was indeed stark.43 Although the rationing of
bread had been introduced in Germany as early as January 1915, the populations
living standards were soon undermined by inflation and shortages. Though the
German people did not starve, their diet was so dramatically affected that it soon
came to encapsulate the hardships endured by civilians.44 The apparent incapacity
of the authorities to feed their population and to regulate supply and consumption during the infamous turnip winter of 191617 directly threatened the social
compact and the war effort.45 In Berlin and Vienna, women vented their anger
along the food queues that symbolized discontent.46 In Petrograd in 1917, hunger
and a burning desire for peace fanned the revolutionary flames.
The operations and contours of the state
Economic mobilization revealed the critical importance of the belligerent states
but also underlined the respective specificities of their political systems. Entrusted
with national defence, the institutions of the state entered into new relationships
with businesses and civil society organizations to meet the challenges of industrial
warfare. In 1914, many commentators doubted that the liberal democratic states
would be able to mobilize the economy effectively enough; the kind of uncontested authority claimed, if not always enjoyed, by authoritarian states was often
deemed to be key to a successful economic mobilization that would direct the
resources of the nation towards the prosecution of the war. Yet in the event liberal
democratic regimes proved equal to the task. Liberalism successfully harnessed the
techniques of business management as well as the tools of the state to meet the
demands of total war.
The mobilization of resources pitted national bureaucracies against one another;
this competition, played out in the economic realm, had a critical impact on the
conflicts outcomes. Most analysts evoke the role played by the wartime industrialized Leviathan, and rightly so. Indeed, as Fabienne Bock aptly observed, the
wartime state was distinguished by its exuberance.47 To some extent, however,
this characterization belies the nature of the wartime relationship between the
state and other economic agents. In fact, the experience of the war emphasized the limitations of the state as much as it stressed its undeniable capacity
to steer the economy for the benefit of national defence. The war gave rise to
new forms of cooperation between the belligerent state, business and civil society,
and engendered new forms of corporatist cooperation between civil servant and
businessman.48
43
44
45
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Middlemas, Politics in industrial society: the experience of the British system since 1911 (London: Deutsch, 1979); Ellis
Wayne Hawley, The Great War and the search for a modern order: a history of the American people and their institutions,
19171933 (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1997); Ajay K. Mehrotra, Lawyers, guns, and public moneys: the
US Treasury, World War I, and the administration of the modern fiscal state, Law and History Review 28: 1,
15 Feb. 2010, pp. 173225.
49
Strachan, Total war in the twentieth century, p. 273.
50
Balderston, Industrial mobilization and war economies, pp. 2245.
51
Marcel Mauss, La Nation (19401948), LAnne Sociologique 7 (n.d.), pp. 568.
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Claim-making and social mobilization
Defined as supreme authority within a territory, the sovereign enjoys, as Robert
P. Wolff put it, the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed.52
In 191418, the authority of the state rested on its capacity to wage war without
undermining the living standards of its mobilized citizenry. The legitimacy of
the state was intimately bound up with the way it prosecuted war. Central to
Webers work, legitimacy is not some abstract quality, but an observable
activity in which governments characteristically engage, the making of claims.53
Claim-making was indeed critically important to wartime mobilization, as belli
gerent populations constantly defined their contribution to the war effort through
negotiation and bargaining. Existing political cultures offered the framework for
such negotiations, in which the state was just one actor among many, albeit the
dominant one. The significance of these negotiations was revealed by the mechanisms and institutions set up to allocate essential resources such as manpower,
for example the British military service tribunals. Representatives of civil society
thus adjudicated conflicts which reflected wider debates over the extraction of
the means of war-making.54 These debates highlighted the significance of the
constant process of negotiation whereby civil society attempted to limit the
claims of the state over the nation.
Likewise in Germany, the implementation of the Hindenburg Programme, the
high commands plan for the authoritarian mobilization of the nations resources,
had to come to terms with the growing importance of organized labour and a
certain parliamentarisation of the German system of government.55 Scholars thus
stressed the necessity and importance of the states ability to secure the consent of
key groups in civil society.56 Indeed, as General Groener put it in November 1916,
the war could in any case not be won against the opposition of the workers.57
Throughout the war, social conflicts including strikes and other forms of
petitioning enabled belligerent societies to articulate the conditions of their
commitment to the war effort. At the front, soldiers resistance to discipline,
including mutinies, revealed similar dynamics at work.58 Indeed, the logic of mass
participation in industrial warfare contributed to the extension and gradual
if often limitedempowerment of the citizenry. As Charles Tilly pointed
out, the relationship between war making and civilian politics [had] altered
52
53
Robert Paul Wolff, In defense of anarchism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 4.
Rodney S. Barker, Legitimating identities: the self-presentations of rulers and subjects (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 2.
54
On the articulation of war-making, state-making, protection, extraction, distribution and production, see
Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, ad 9901990 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990),
p. 97.
55
Kocka, Facing total war, p. 130.
56
James Cronin, The crisis of state and society in Britain, 191722, in Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly,
eds, Strikes, wars, and revolutions in an international perspective: strike waves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme,
1989), p. 459.
57
Kocka, Facing total war, p. 136.
58
Smith, Between mutiny and obedience; Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War and the remaking of America
(Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
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months of the war and the subsequent debate over the ideas of 1914 prompted
important debates over the nature of the national community. Later, as Benjamin
Ziemann has pointed out, social movements in which women played a prominent
role articulated discourses of political participation that often rested on notions
of rights and entitlement.67 Finally, like the 1917 French mutinies, the collapse of
the German empiredescribed by Wilhelm Deist as a covert soldiers strike68
demonstrated that if the sovereign is to be defined by its capacity to suspend the
current legal regime in response to an emergency, sovereignty clearly was in the
hands of the mobilized citizenry.
Schmitts attempt to redefine sovereignty chimes with Ludendorff s prescription for the next war and represents a truly reactionary attempt to turn the clock
back to the status quo ante bellum. For the First World War had actually demonstrated
that, despite its best efforts, the state could not successfully claim a monopoly on
sovereignty.69 In fact, the logic of mass participation in wartime constrained the
state even while it enabled it to act in unprecedented ways, since its very legitimacy depended on its capacity to uphold a social compact now redefined by the
sacrifice of soldiers and civilians alike. As the state made claims over civil society in
the name of national defence, both combatants and civilians increasingly invoked
popular sovereignty to make claims upon the state.
War, revolution and political change
Finally, as Halvy put it, the world crisis of 19141918 was not only a warthe
war of 1914but also a revolutionthe revolution of 1917.70 Beyond Russia,
the war had in fact brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
empires and allowed the birth or rebirth of nations across Europe. Across the
belligerent world, from Washington to Beijing, postwar social movements
challenged established political, racial, gendered and social hierarchies. In the eyes
of these protesters, the Great War had demonstrated the need for a redefinition of
the contours of their national citizenry.71 In Germany and Austria, the postwar
enfranchisement of women in a revolutionary context underlined the assimilation of national and popular sovereignty. In establishing a democratic republic,
the postwar Austrian constitution proclaims its law emanates from the people.
Another defeated power, the Ottoman empire, also illustrated a radical break with
67
Benjamin Ziemann, Germany 19141918: total war as a catalyst of change, in Helmut Walser Smith,
ed., The Oxford handbook of modern German history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), http://www.
oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199237395.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199237395-e-17,
accessed 13 Feb. 2014.
68
W. Deist, The military collapse of the German empire: the reality behind the stab-in-the-back myth, War in
History 3: 2, 1 April 1996, pp. 186207.
69
For a discussion of Schmitts contemporary import, see Andrew Norris, Sovereignty, exception, and norm,
Journal of Law and Society 34: 1, March 2007, pp. 3145.
70
Halvy, The era of tyrannies, p. 162.
71
Jennifer D. Keene, Protest and disability: a new look at African-American soldiers during the First World
War, in Pierre Purseigle, ed., Warfare and belligerence: perspectives in First World War studies (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2005), pp. 177203; Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of democracy: African American soldiers in the World War
I era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
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Edward Meade Earle, The new constitution of Turkey, Political Science Quarterly 40: 1, 1925, pp. 73100.
Arno Mayer, The persistence of the old regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
John Horne, Labour at war: France and Britain 19141918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Peter Holquist, Making war, forging revolution: Russias continuum of crisis, 19141921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
76
Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1897), p. 72. See also Adolf Hausrath,
ed., Treitschke, his doctrine of German destiny and of international relations, together with a study of his life and work (New
York and London: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1914).
77
Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, p. 67.
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the interdependence of state and civil society, the war emphasized that the state
cannot merely be apprehended in institutional terms, for it is first and foremost a
social formation. Further, the logic of mass participation in the war transformed
the relationship of individuals and groups to the state. It did so largely in a contingent and pragmatic way. In doing so, however, it also affected the political and
ethical underpinnings of the states legitimacy. In challenging monolithic and
centralized conceptions of state authority, the social history of the conflict can
therefore contribute to further our understanding of the transformations of the
state in the First World War.78
78
For a stimulating and opposite conception of sovereignty, see James J. Sheehan, The problem of sovereignty
in European history, American Historical Review 111: 1, 1 Feb. 2006, pp. 115.
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